[sedatk]

"Probably" is doing a lot of heavylifting there. Digital backup discipline for consumers emerged way before digital cameras. We used to have backups in floppies, and then CD-R's, which were common and made physical backups very cheap. Not just data, we had to back up software too because we didn't have an app store to reinstall them from.

In the late 90's, advent of MP3 also made people focus more on digital backup strategies until Bittorrent came and people started believing that they could get things back anytime from an ethereal faucet. It wasn't so. The same happened with cloud. People thought their Google Drive was their backup. It wasn't so.

So, even the opposite could be argued: that people's digital backups got worse over the last two decades because they relied too much on third party virtual services that were not as reliable as physical media.

[jagged-chisel]

> … digital backup discipline for consumers …

You have a lot more faith in typical consumers than I do. I wouldn’t call any of those I knew in the 90s/00s “disciplined” with data backups, let alone the wherewithal to have considered software backups.

[sedatk]

Discipline not in a strict 3-2-1 sense, but more pragmatic like “if I lose this, it’ll be too much trouble”. Everyone had a box of floppies or spindle of CDs for their backups. Backup was part of life because the cost of data loss was immense.